Dreamscapes....Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung identify dreams as an interaction between the unconscious and the conscious. Dreams are seen as being projections of parts of oneself. Often these are parts that have been ignored, rejected or even suppressed. Or are they? The mysterious and often bizarre nature of dreams has led many to interpret dreams as divine gifts or messages, as predictions of the future, or as messages from the past.

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"I had a dream at long last of Ci, during the early morning hours of 1 June. I was at an outdoor party (looked like a barbeque..but it was in a cold country), sitting on a bench with my kids. Cici suddenly appeared and sat between Andrea and myself, somewhat invisible to the rest, but looking every bit herself, although she had long hair (like what she had 7-8 years ago), and was wearing a navy blue t-shirt. She said to me, "Come, I want to talk to you.."..I took her hand and walked away with her. It came as no surprise that I spoke more than she did.. asking her why she left us, telling her how much I missed her, etc.. all she kept saying was,"I am fine.. really I am ok.. I am really ok".. I then proceeded to ask her what heaven was like, and she said it was "nice".. again saying, "I'm ok", smiling. I wanted to know who she had met there.. .and was racking my brains to think of people whom she may have met.. all that came to mind was "Por por".... Anyway... my dream ended abruptly as the phone rang at 5.30am!!!! I so wished for the dream to continue...

However, I must say that having had a dream of Cici telling me that she's fine, and having seen her smiling face has led me to feel more reassured and at peace. I woke up feeling content that she was happy and at peace with herself and that she had given me the chance to dream about her, my best friend.. That's about all I can remember! And I still feel reassured that she's really fine. "
-AudreyR (June 2006)

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"Wanted to share with you this dream I had last night. I was in the music room at St Igs with some of our old 10:45am mass choir mates. I think Audrey and Angela were there. And Frances was there too. She was expressing concern in her usual caring way about my knee. ( I actually have been nursing a strained knee joint this past week so I guess that's reality colliding with the subconscious mind). She was urging me to see a doctor about it and recommended someone.
The odd thing was that in the dream, we all knew that she had gone to heaven and were somewhat surprised to see her. Not shocked or scared. Just a little surprised. And I actually said "Fudge, what are you doing here? Aren't you... " To which she replied, "Aiya, I'm always around when I'm needed lah."
I woke up with a deep sense of loss yet at the same time, I felt oddly comforted."
-AngelinaF (June 2006)

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"She was dressed in a beautiful white high-necked lace dress and looking radiant. We hugged each other and held each other. All the things that had not been said, the deep sadness I felt at not seeing her before her sudden departure, this terrible sense of loss.

But in that dream, there were no words. There was no need for words. I felt her love and that she was at peace."
- AngelaS (July 2006)

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As many would agree, Frances was an excellent and most patient voice teacher and although I'd only had lessons with her for 5 months, I was rather inspired by her and other than a common love for singing, I found out she had also done corporate banking for some time so she was able to relate to what I had to tell her about my career path (I'm currently in corporate banking but realise that finance isn't really my choice career).

The first 2 months after Frances had left us, I was very much saddened and wondered often as to how she would be in heaven for I know that it is there that we have eternal happiness. Well, what I wanted to let you know was that I had a dream about three months back. It was a nice and comforting dream to say the least. I'm pretty certain it was a confirmation to what I'd been thinking all this while. In my dream, I was sitting on a sofa atop a tall building in the midst of clouds and whilst i was seated, Frances appeared and came to sit opposite me. Her face was radiant and she had a large beam on her face. I remember clearly her smile and I was so excited to see her and asked her how she was. She replied in a way to tell us not to worry and to say that although she was no longer on earth, she was very much alive with our Father in Heaven. That was the crux of the dream and which has stayed with me til today (I've written it down in a journal too). I hope this doesn't sound too strange to you to hear this from me but I thought that I'd like to share it with you. We all miss her but somehow we do know that she is together with choirs of angels watching us from above and will always be present in our hearts.
-ElizabethN (November 2006)

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Psychologist Joe Griffin, one of the founders of human givens psychology, has put forward an explanation for why humans dream: The expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming. He reviewed all the available scientific evidence and conducted a 12 year program of research that showed that all dreams are expressed in the form of sensory metaphors. Interviewed by New Scientist he explained how his findings "show that ordinarily dream sleep does a great housekeeping job for us. Each night it brings down our autonomic arousal level. Dreams are metaphorical translations of those waking introspections – emotionally arousing feelings and thoughts – that we don’t act upon while we are awake. Once aroused, our brain has to complete that cycle of arousal and, if we don’t complete it in the external world, we do so in our dream sleep. The patterns of arousal are metaphorically acted out and thereby deactivated.

"Letting off steam" usually dissipates anger, but if animals were to act out their emotions instantly every time they were emotionally aroused, that would be disastrous. So animals needed to evolve the ability to inhibit arousals when necessary and deactivate them later when they could do no harm. Griffin hypothesized that that is why animals evolved to dream. During REM sleep, unfulfilled emotional expectations left over from the day are run out in the form of metaphors, thus deactivating them and freeing up the brain to deal with the new emotionally arousing events of the following day. Without dreams fulfilling animals' expectations by acting them out metaphorically, and thereby quelling the autonomic nervous system, animals would need a vastly bigger brain.
-New Scientist.